Haiti recovery essentials: water, medical supplies...and cell phones?

KPCC's Molly Peterson on a Gilligan's Island style tour of environmental stories in and affecting Southern California. Named for the Yvor Winters poem: "The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand/Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land..."
Follow the blog at @PacificSwell and Molly at @KPCCmolly.

During the water story I was thinking of what it means; how some international political theorists think of it as a "basic right." Like liberty, and food. Plenty of people have written books about water as a coming political crisis in recent years: Steven Solomon has one out I'd love to read, called Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilization. (interestingly, he's got a blurb from the guy who wrote The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. Must all quests be epic?) At the State of the Bay Conference yesterday, I listened to Dr. Bill Cooper from UC Irvine's Urban Water Research Center talk about how he thought the price for water was ridiculously low in California, where it's increasingly scarce. I think of Katrina, of course; people without water for days, without much water for a week. It doesn't matter that it's in our country. What matters is the unquenched and unquenchable need.